This morning while Robert and Phil slept in I went down to the restaurant at the Red Lion in Eureka and availed myself of the buffett. I had eggs, french toast, potatoes and fruit. After the guys got up we went and checked out and then headed into Fortuna to go to church. We were going to check out the church our family had gone to when we lived here between 1962-1965. We were a little early for church so we drove into Ferndale, a real small town, but the home of Food Network star Guy Fieri. We drove most of the way out to the base where Dad had been stationed, the road didn’t look like much had been done to it since we left in 1964. We got out to the last big turn before the base and that was when I realized how much had changed. There used to be a big house right there and a statue of the Virgin Mary in the hillside and that was all gone. We then turned around and I took a road back to Main Street and there it was the building I started my formal education in. Ferndale Elementary School, I don’t remember anyone from there at all or any teachers. After snapping a couple of pictures we headed back to Fortuna to go to church, we used the navigation from our phone to get to the church which looked vaguely familiar. We went in and talked to the Pastor for a little while, he was from Dallas, OR, had gone to seminary in Portland, had attended Trinity Baptist and had work with Cadence in Germany. So to get to the point he knew of , or knew people that Robert and I knew. His name was Mike Schellenberg, and then he conducted the entire service by himself. It was like attending a church service from the 80′s or 90′s.
After church we got on Highway 101 and headed south, we stopped in Rio Dell to get gas, stopped for lunch in Willits at Subway (Robert really likes Subway), as we headed south along the highway I kept looking for my oldest son. He is working in California for the summer and had mentioned that he might be along the 101 went we went past. But didn’t see him even when we went past the road to where he is working. We got to Petaluma and kept hitting construction projects and so traffic slowed to a crawl for many miles. We got off 101 so that we could cross the Golden Gate, traffic was pretty heavy there also. The fog was too thick to go up to the viewpoint so we went across, we were scrambling to find money to pay the toll, but all the signs said don’t stop and pay by plate, so we have no idea if we paid the toll or not. We then rolled through town listening to Tony Bennett sing I Left My Heart in San Francisco. After we left San Francisco we rolled on down the Pacific Coast Highway to Santa Cruz, talking about Mavericks as we went past Half Moon Bay and Robert reading the Mavericks entry in wikipedia as we rolled by. We got to Santa Cruz and checked into our room at the Comfort Inn, two blocks from the Boardwalk. We got to the Boardwalk at 8 PM just as they were closing down. We walked up and down the boardwalk and I talked about coming to Santa Cruz with the youth group from Lakeside Baptist in Oakland, CA and with Rick Lindholm. We found a little Mexican restaurant just across the street from the Boardwalk, it was pretty good. Then we came back and tried to find the Beavers game but they had finished blowing out K-State. Robert blew up his air mattress and the only way to fight it in and move stuff around so that we were barricaded into the room.
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